I feel like a winner: “Congratulations!” it says. Now all I have to do is pay my taxes! I guess at some level I should feel good that the IRS has accepted my creation.

The cute icons are a nice touch but don’t go far enough. I’d use the Windows animated file copy dialog as a guide and show dollar signs floating from you to the IRS.

As a last resort (and this comes from a guy who works there), I contacted customer support who got back to me the following day. Apparently Yahoo! Groups has a restriction that prevents so-called “generic” email accounts from joining, presumably in the fight against spam.

Sure enough, search through the help turned up the topic What does Yahoo! Groups do to prevent spam abuse?, which in part states:

No generic addresses: Email addresses such as webmaster@domain.com or postmaster@domain.com cannot be used to join a group. Messages from Groups should be personal and should not use email addresses which commonly recycled within an organization. In addition, spammers commonly target these addresses. For all these reasons, we disallow their user on the service.

I’m not sure how restricting certain email accounts is going to help prevent spam in any way, but at least now I can work around the problem.

I had a quick flashback to the BFG of video gaming days, but alas it was just another article about the popularity of Facebooks apps.

It’s a simple site that does just one thing: show you a list of the five Wikipedia pages that are geographically closest to your current location. It’s designed (or not-designed) to be used mainly from mobile phones.

The idea for the site came from living in Oxford for a year. The city is full of beautiful old historic buildings (many of them colleges), but very few of them are labelled or signposted. With wikinear.com and a GPS hooked up to Fire Eagle, I can pull out my phone and see a list of the closest points of interest, plotted on a handy map.

You’ll need a Fire Eagle beta invite code to use the service. (Sign up on the Fire Eagle site if you need one.) Then sign in to Wikinear.com which will fetch your location from Fire Eagle, then display a few points of interest near your current location.

Here’s an example using Sunnyvale California (Yahoo HQ) as my location:

Testing the site with my Treo 650 was a little sketchy. The Wikinear site seems fine (although the layout doesn’t quite work for the Treo browser), but the sequence of logging in to Yahoo (190 KB page size) then authorizing Fire Eagle (182 KB) is way too heavy for mobile users. Ideally we’d have lighter-weight versions of those pages available for Fire Eagle developers.

Even with that, this is a great application that shows the potential of Fire Eagle and mashes up some existing services in a creative way.

(Via Mobile Mammoth)

The book brings together several suggestions in a nice combination, including task prioritization and to-do lists, blocking out your most creative time, and some concepts I hadn’t seen before like "do it tomorrow".

If you find the book helpful, check out the wishful thinking blog as well.